Tablet Video Viewing On Fire – Ooyala Q4 2011 Video Index

I got an advance sneak peek at Ooyala’s Video Index for Q4 2011, and I didn’t even have to beg! Every quarter, Ooyala looks at more than one billion analytics pings a day, follows the viewing habits of over 100 million unique viers and then sums it all up in nice tidy packages every quarter for the industry. It’s probably one of the few truly global quarterly reports because nearly 50% of all their video views tracked are outside of the US.

The Ooyala Methodology

DATA SOURCES & SAMPLE SIZE

The data sample used in this report covers the fourth quarter of 2011, from October 1 through December 31. All data was taken from an anonymous cross-section of Ooyala’s global customer and partner database—an array of broadcasters, studios, cable operators, print publications, online media companies and consumer brands. These firms broadcast video to over 100 different countries from more than 5,000 unique domains. More than 100 million unique viewers watch an Ooyala-powered video every month.

This data sample is not intended to represent the entire Internet or all online video viewers.

DATA COLLECTION

Ooyala’s video analytics technology collects all anonymized video data in real time. During playback, Ooyala’s video player continuously gathers information and relays it to an analytics module, which then stores the data in a distributed file system, Hadoop. Viewer statistics are then complied and stored in a Cassandra data cluster, where the information is made readily available for analysis.

The Results – Tablet Video Viewing On The Rise

One of the things I absolutely love about Ooyala is how thorough they are in their transparency. There are two pages in the report, one about methodology and one is a glossary defining all the terms they use along with a metrics and definitions area where they show actual formulae they use. Bravo! In the early version of the report I got, some graphs didn’t have legends on them. Then I realized that they were using the same colors for the platforms throughout the report, so they didn’t really need to label them. Alright, on to the results!

In the last quarter of 2011 tablets were on fire 22% growth in viewing time over Q3, that crushed all other platforms. That’s not to say that other platforms didn’t see admirable growth in the quarter, all platforms saw more than 11% increase in viewing time over the previous quarter, I bet it was all that Christmas goop.

On top of that average conversion rates for all devices went from 35.1% to 39.6% in Q4.They also say that Tweeting a video isn’t nearly as common for sharing as copy/pasting a VURL (video URL).

In fact, about 38% of all desktop and tablet video views were completed, just 7% lower than game consoles and connected TVs (CTV/GC) while 25% completion rates reached into the 50-60% range. Mobile was the lowest for all rates while tablets topped desktops and in the 1/4 watched category nearly matched CTV/GC.

There was also massive growth in video viewing on non-desktop devices, with much of that coming in late November through to the end of December. Perhaps some online shopping had an impact there.

Speaking of massive growth, I’ve got one right here, Google TV saw a 91% rise in video plays that quarter. Well done!

When looking at just tablets vs. mobiles, the mobiles are still leading the way with 60% of views and 53% of time, however considering the number of video-capable mobile phones vs the number of tablets in the market, that’s pretty impressive for tablets.

Just talking about connected TVs and game consoles Long-form videos (>10min) accounted for 57% of the hours watched on a connected TV or game console while short videos accounted for 19%. Oddly, desktop had the highest percentage of under one minute video viewing and the lowest percentage of long form. So we watch more very short form content at the PC instead of the long stuff which we like better on just about every other device, including mobile which had about 30% of all videos watched on that platform being more than 10 minutes in length where on the desktop it was just 25% of videos viewed.

They have some stats about iOS vs. Android in there but it seems unfair since the iPhone 4S came out in that quarter and many Android products saw adoption at Christmas time. What that tells me is that there might be a massive shift in these numbers come the Q1 2012 video index. Androids had just 5% of total video time watched and only 3% of video plays vs. iPhone. So that’s something I’ll be interested to see this quarter.

Here’s the full “snapshot” infographic they created to showcase the report’s highlights:

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